Zerto helps when real problems hit your virtual servers

Much like Apple’s elegant Time Machine software helps make backing up your MacBook effortless, Zerto wants to make disaster recovery in the cloud just as simple. The Structure 2011 LaunchPad company, which was created in November 2009 but actually launched at Structure, wants to become the disaster recovery service for companies that rely on the cloud.

To do this, CEO Ziv Kedem has raised a total of $6.2 million in seed and Series A financing from Greylock Partners and others to build out Zerto. The company will provide its software as a service to cloud providers or enterprise customers needing backup and recovery options for virtualized infrastructure. Zerto does its replication at the hypervisor layer so it can track the virtual machines running on a server, their state and virtual networks, and other elements. It’s also storage-agnostic, so customers can port their data to whatever kind of storage provider (cloud or not) that they want.

The hypervisor-level replication is critical to Zerto’s value proposition, because the product accounts for movement of applications and changes to the state of VMs that first-generation DR products do not. This means VMware users (Zerto only supports VMware for the time being) can utilize dynamic tools such as vMotion, vApps and Distributed Resource Scheduler without fearing their DR strategy won’t be able to keep up with what’s running where.